Monty Python's Flying Circus, Vol. 7 [DVD]

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And now the news for Monty Python fans: this volume contains episodes 20, 21, and 22 from the second groundbreaking season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. By this time, audiences expected something completely different from Monty Python, and the anarchic troupe delivers. Highlights include The Attila the Hun Show with John Cleese as the barbarian who literally wants his children to “get a head”; Basil and his gang of killer sheep; the news for parrots, gibbons, and wombats; an examination of the role of the village idiot in society; a wildlife excursion with two mosquito hunters (“You hate him, then you respect him, then you kill him”); and “the story of one man’s search for vengeance in the raw and violent world of international archaeology.” And, of course, there’s sport. Hitting their creative stride, the Pythons further delighted in subverting television convention. One sketch is abandoned before it even starts. At one point, they offer a nice version of a nastily funny sketch featuring Terry Jones as Sniveling Little Rat-Face Git and John Cleese as his wife, Dreary, Fat, and Boring. Episode 22 contains Killer Cars and the military precision camping-it-up drill, which were adapted for Monty Python’s first film, And Now for Something Completely Different. Others, such as Norman Singent Polevaulter, the man who contradicts everything (“No, I don’t”), The Death of Mary Queen of Scots, and the penguin on the TV set turned up on Another Monty Python Record. –Donald Liebenson